


Apotheosis/Relentess

by Ataleofterror



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, Betrayal, Birth of a villain, Canon Compliant, Captain Crozier creates a monster, Corporal Punishment, Fear, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Male Homosexuality, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Secret Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-20
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-12 03:47:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28878981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ataleofterror/pseuds/Ataleofterror
Summary: Billy and Hickey's respective POVs of his lashing.
Relationships: William Gibson/Cornelius Hickey
Comments: 3
Kudos: 14





	Apotheosis/Relentess

**Author's Note:**

> First time posting so please be gentle! Let me know if there are any typos, I've tried my best!
> 
> Just finished my first watch this past week and cannot stop obsessing about the show, especially these two characters. Hickey especially is such an interesting character (credit to the actor). I'm obsessed with their relationship. Really enjoying reading all of your work so thought I'd give it a go!
> 
> I saw a prompt from the Marian Keyes writing challenge and it immediately evoked Hickey in my mind (the first 2 lines of the story).

Apotheosis

As he stepped away, pale and bowed, he suddenly looked up, sweeping his gaze over the congregation. In the sea of appalled faces, he saw Billy. Their eyes locked and his blazed with sudden recognition, as he returned back from whatever plane of existence he had gone to due to the excruciating pain. Billy felt utterly seen, naked and vulnerable, in spite of the layers of his neatly pressed uniform shielding him. The man before him was no longer the Hickey he recognised. The cold metallic glint in his eyes, which Billy had only glimpsed before and was never directed at him, now felt as cold and hard as a knife against his throat. “This is your fault” they seemed to say. Billy averted his gaze. 

In spite of his difficulty walking and obvious pain, Hickey walked tall, with a straight back, chin out, challenging all those he passed, so that they were the ones who felt ashamed. Crozier was the only one who seemed unabashed, whether because of his obvious inebriation or sense of righteousness, it wasn’t clear. Even Fitzjames looked chastened. Billy left with the same thought on his mind as surely every other man in the hold had: he was glad it wasn’t him. But at the same time, he wished it had been anyone else but Hickey.

Billy returned to his cabin and looked at the blood he had wiped from his face. Cornelius’ blood. He rubbed it between his fingers. An overwhelming sense of nausea overcame him. He scrubbed at his fingers with a nail brush until they were raw, as if he’d gone out and plunged his hands into the fresh snow. He attacked the spot on his face where the blood had landed with a cloth until he drew his own. He felt like a marked man, a black cross on his door. 

He forgot Cornelius’ suffering in this moment, consumed by his own sense of foreboding. He lay on his bed and wrapped his long arms around his narrow body, shivering. He felt afraid but didn’t know what of. By rights, any man would be chastened enough and overwhelmed by pain that he would retreat into the background of the ship’s life like a well-trodden plank after such a lashing. 

But Billy felt that this was just the beginning for Hickey, a kind of rebirth. The passage to his apotheosis. Billy had often felt intimated by Cornelius, not just by his unexpected physical strength, his body efficient, tightly coiled like a boxer’s, but by the sheer opaqueness of his mind. He thought he had glimpsed behind this veil of impenetrability in certain intimate moments when he exposed Hickey’s vulnerability in a way that, with a man like that, happens only in his most unguarded moments, when his eyes are turned up to heaven in reverence to pure physical ecstasy. And only then for a moment, the curtain coming down again suddenly, like the interval of a play. 

His fantasy of the pair of them making new lives for themselves in the Sandwich Islands disappeared from his mind like a frozen breath floating away into the Arctic ether. How strange it felt, to think you knew someone, despite their best efforts, only to learn you know nothing at all. That you never really did.  
This realisation pained Billy more than their enforced separation. He had thought of himself as being cruel to be kind, but it seemed Hickey had seen only the cruelty in his actions. To think he had shared so much with this man, Billy’s breaths keeping pace with his in their mutual intoxication, that Hickey knew every inch of his body better than Billy even knew it himself. But that was before. 

Billy sensed nothing would be the same again. 

He felt scared, and not just for himself. For anyone that might stand in this new Hickey’s path. And for Cornelius, too. For such poisoning of the spirit is certain to kill its host, wither it black and rotten from the inside, as sure as arsenic. 

Relentless

He marches in with Hartnell, who is practically shitting himself. “Will it hurt?” he asks. “Of course it fucking will,” Hickey thinks, but doesn’t say. He can smell the blood of the man before him before he sees him. A familiar scent. Hickey inhales deeply, closes his eyes, savouring the scent, and catches Irving looking at him, aghast. He should cast his eyes down like the penitent Hartnell, but he will not. Crozier barely glances in his direction. Little looks like he wants to shit himself as much as Hartnell. 

Hickey walks forward with as much dignity as he can muster in his filthy long johns, as he is shoved forward, hands tied to either side of the large chest. He is stripped and bent over. Not an unfamiliar experience. The first lash comes and it is not as bad as he had feared. The second comes faster than he can take a breath. This one hurts.

On and on it goes, relentless. He tries to suppress his cries, but his head swims, his sight goes black with pain. He doesn’t consciously make a sound but he can tell by the look on the men’s faces when he comes round that he has made noises worse than a woman dying in childbirth. This, he supposes, is the point. 

This is not about him. It is about them. 

Crozier’s voice is impassive as he says “again,” over and over, as Hickey thinks to himself, surely this one must be the last. It is never-ending. He looks at Crozier in an attempted act of defiance, but the captain barely glances in his direction, delivering his instructions as impassively as if he were a bored schoolmaster instructing a slow child to practice his letters. 

Little has gone pale. A fine sheen of sweat has appeared on Fitzjames’ brow. He evens senses that Johnson, who wouldn’t be out of place manning a gallows, is pulling back a little, a certain reluctance to continue. “Again,” Crozier says, and a bitter taste comes into Hickey’s mouth as his mind goes blank once again. At this moment he feels like he would like to die, something he hasn’t felt in a very long time.

And then it is over. The chest is swept away and talk among the officers immediately turns back to the business at hand. A path is cleared as he walks to the sick room but no one dares meet his eye. He senses that the men are afraid to even breathe. He sees Billy, lovely Billy. His Billy. A fleck of his blood on his face like a scarlet letter. Billy looks sad and ashamed. For some reason, this makes Hickey furious. Billy looks up and he casts all of his ire in his direction. After holding his gaze for a few seconds, Billy casts his eyes back down to the ground, clasping his hands. He thinks he sees him shiver. Good, Hickey thinks. Let him shiver.

Hickey hobbles to MacDonald, who treats him with an avuncular kindness that further enrages him. He longs for the casual disdain of Dr. Stanley. He doesn’t think he could bear the pity of Goodsir. 

As the salt stings his freshly torn flesh, he thinks he should thank Crozier, shake his hand really, for doing him such a favour. In spite of the tears still clouding his eyes, Hickey sees better than ever the microcosm he exists in and his exact role in it.


End file.
